


a long winter's night

by aes3plex



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Post-Canon Fix-It, Threesome - F/M/M, egregious allusions to visual artforms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:00:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21908599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aes3plex/pseuds/aes3plex
Summary: Fitzjames looks less like a portrait than she remembers.
Relationships: Sophia Cracroft/Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 19
Kudos: 74
Collections: 12 Days of Carnivale ~ 2018





	a long winter's night

**Author's Note:**

> This was written & posted [on Tumblr](https://aes-iii.tumblr.com/post/181575400626/a-long-winters-night-jamesfrancissophia) for 12 Days of Carnivale 2018.

Fitzjames looks less like a portrait than she remembers.

Halfway down the stairs she must stop, she finds, to take him in. In the dark of her hall, in the glow of her lamps, in profile: full brass, stiff collar and cuffs. Whenever she thinks of him it is as something from the last century, a sketch of the young Keppel, a halfdrawn figure behind Howe or Duncan: white breeches and silk stockings, honourably receiving a blade from some kneeling admiral.

Here instead he is, dripping on her hall rug, and he looks like a man: just a man, in a salt-stained coat, with a lined face and something to his stance that suggests old injury. Terribly handsome, yes. Terribly tired. Holds his hat under his arm, though John has taken his greatcoat: his eyes on his own braid in the hall glass. As she watches he lifts a hand to his hair and pushes it from his face: turns the curl in his fingers.

At the rustle of her skirts he turns his head. Looks, she thinks, unhappy.

“Mrs Crozier,” he says, inclining his head. All that stiff exhausted grace, not at all like Francis’s, somehow. “I had sought your husband.” It sounds like an admission: a disappointment.

She is still halfway down the stairs.

“Forgive me,” Fitzjames says. “How uncivil I am: I have only just come up from Portsmouth. You look very well.” This as if it weighs on him, and his eyes trace the line of her skirts. The spell snaps: she takes a step down, and another.

“You must be exhausted, Captain,” she says, as she reaches him. “Please, come into the parlour—have a glass of something—“

He straightens into formality. “I really must—“

“Francis will be in shortly,” she says. “Won’t you wait? Gin, isn’t it?”

He swallows it like a hook and follows.

-

She had wondered if it was Fitzjames.

Francis had declined to tell her, of course, and she had not pressed: such secrets cost. It was not his to say. But she had felt it between them almost from the first.

On their wedding night, on their marriage bed, when they were both of them wrung like cloth and dripping sweat and sated, she had asked him who he had loved, and he had told her. Yes, there had been women—of course there had. Yes, men too. He had not blushed to tell her so and she loves him more for it.

 _And now?_ , she’d said.

 _You_ , he’d answered, and she’d kissed him long and hard and slipped his hand into her shift to cup her breast. Felt him exhale against her mouth.

 _And_ , she’d said. _Others?_

_Yes. No. Not anymore._

_Who._

And he’d turned his head: just half a turn. Not even a refusal: just an absence of an answer.

Ah, she’d thought.

There are certain expectations a person has, as a sailor’s wife, whether married to a stoker or an admiral. This one, at least, suits her. She has not been chaste and would not ask it of him: in this she thinks they understand one another.

(Once, brooding, he asks: “Did you ever have Ross,” something unexpectedly tight in his voice: when she tells him no he looks like a weight has been lifted from him, and ashamed by it, too. Perhaps it ought to tweak her, but somehow it doesn’t.

“And you?” she asks, and he laughs—blusters—no, absurd—but she does not think she was wrong to ask.

She dreams that night of being between them: wakes damp and too hot—presses her hand against herself through her nightgown. Takes her pleasure in the dark with Francis asleep beside her, snoring slightly, and curls against him when she’s done.)

—

In her blue parlour Fitzjames stands like a figure of himself before the fire, his wrist on the mantel, his glass in his hand. ( _He’ll take brandy in company_ , Francis had told her, when first they’d asked Fitzjames to dinner: _gin if alone_. What a thing to know of a man, Sophia had thought.)

“Are you in Brighton,” she asks, when the quiet has filled the room entirely. She has a sense of it as a great velvet cushion pressing down on them, exhausting every space, restraining hands and tongues. Regards him: his still-brown hair, its glossy curl flattened by the rain. His coat well cut, his back still straight. A shockingly beautiful man: how lucky Francis is, she thinks.

“I am,” he says, and can’t seem to continue. Francis had always told her he was a talker but here words seem beyond him: some unknown country. She wonders, suddenly, if something terrible has happened.

“And how was—Madras?”

No response: only the swirl of his glass in his hand and the fire reflected in it.

“Hot,” he says eventually.

Oh but this is tedious.

“Captain Fitzjames,” she says, “is something troubling you?”

He looks at her for a moment and then a smile, bright with gold, illuminates his face: she can feel the vast lantern of his charm lit in her direction: “My god,” he says, “I am dull, aren’t I? Come, let me tell you of the East Indies Station,” sitting elegantly beside her on the chaise, and it is all of it false: she knows this: and irresistible anyway.

=

( _How did you come to choose me_ , she asks, idly, with her hand on Francis’s chest.

 _I love you_ , says Francis. Turns his head against her shoulder: turns his clear blue eyes to hers.

 _You love him, too_ , Sophia says.

 _Ah_ , says Francis. A pause: his hand in her loose hair, following a curl. _I gave you my word first_ , he says, eventually.

And I refused it, Sophia doesn’t say.

 _Does he hate you for it_ , she asks instead: sometimes she curses her own bluntness, and sometimes relishes it.

 _I don’t know_ , Francis says. _I don’t know_.)

=

“Captain Crozier, ma'am,” Hannah says, around the door.

And Francis comes in half distracted, his coat already off—talking, as always, about dockyard politics—masters’ buttons, inferior gilding—and stops, three steps into the room. Sways, as if he’s hit some submerged invisible thing.

“James,” he says. Such a series of thoughts across his face: she cannot track all of them, but some, at least, are familiar. Affection. Hurt. Hope.

“Francis,” says Fitzjames, putting down his glass on the sidetable. He rises, correcting his waistcoat—straightens himself to his full graceful height—

Something is going to happen, she thinks.

They move towards one another like failing clockwork: the inevitability of the action set against the diminishing energy necessary to complete it. Like ships, she thinks, trying to read obscure signals. Waiting for the sound of guns.

“I hadn’t meant to come,“ James says, low, something regretful in his voice.

“You know you are always welcome,” says Francis, and she would call the tone dismissal if she didn’t know it for hurt.

A foot from one another now, and Fitzjames’s hand comes up. Hangs in the empty space between him. Opens, closes. His glance, beyond all reason, comes to her.

She looks at him without rising. “Shall I go,” she says. Means it, entirely. (Idly: wonders if they will lie together, soon—if such things are—repairable. Just the picture of it. A little flare of heat somewhere deep in her.)

“Perhaps—a moment—” Fitzjames says.

“Stay,” says Francis.

James looks at him.

“She knows all, James,” Francis says, with that slight tip to his chin that says defiance.

Betrayal in a flash across Fitzjames’s face. He nods, once, tightly. For a moment Sophia thinks he will fly.

“I wasn’t told,” Sophia says. “I came to it myself.” She swallows. “I don’t mind,” she says, and finds it true. Fitzjames makes a choked sound that might be a laugh.

On the mantel the carriage clock ticking. The flicker of the firelight on the panelled walls.

She rises from her place on the chaise.

“I think perhaps I ought to go,” she says, gently, to Francis.

The look he gives her: loss, confusion. She takes his hand: holds it a moment. “Send for me when you’ve finished,” she says. “I would like to know how things fall.”

As she passes Fitzjames she extends a hand to him, too—he takes it without question, although he looks uncertain.

“Be kind,” she says, and then she goes from the room.

—

(“What do you think he meant by it?” she asks, leaning at the carriage window, as the column passes view. The little figure almost invisible above, lost in the low London rain. Francis says nothing: a grey mood on him, today, and no interest. “‘Kiss me, Hardy’?”

That, at least, lifts his eyes to hers. Amusement or bitterness around his mouth. “Kismet,” he says, something wry in it. “Sir John will have told you, I’m sure, that it was 'Kismet’.”

“Oh?” She says. “Do you think so?” She settles back in her seat.

He looks blankly at her. Then the edge of a smile: he has realized they are playing.

“He meant nothing at all, save to ask a little comfort,” he says. “The man was dying. A friend was near. A solace.”

“And you’d have asked Thomas Blanky to kiss you, would you?”

He laughs at that.

“No, but I shall tell him that you asked.”

“I wonder, though,” she says, eyes on the window.

“Aye,” says Francis. “You and the fleet.”

“And Lady Hamilton such an interesting woman,” Sophia says, idly. “With such interesting friends.”

Silence, now, from Francis.

“Do you think the three of them…” She lets it slide, fade.

“Well,” she says, arranging her skirts. Letting her eyes catch Francis’s, now. “I shall have to think on it further.”)

—

There is no shouting, though she had thought perhaps there might be. She isn’t certain whether it bodes well or ill.

She sits at a card table and puts a button on a cuff. Across the hall she can hear their paced footsteps, their strained voices—once, an oath, Fitzjames she thinks, saying _oh god_ in such desperation—

To think, that her Francis can be as cruel as she.

—

When the door across the hall comes off its latch and Francis steps quietly out it must be eight o'clock: a still and soundless winter night. Her sewing in her lap. She has got good at them, these naval blues and golds. John helps her, sometimes, with the detail work: his steward’s fingers faster than hers will ever be.

“Sophy,” Francis says, from a distance away. She looks up at him: he doesn’t look as though his heart has broken. (That is a look she knows, on him.)

“How shall we go on,” he says, not despairing, merely—inquiring.

“Quite easily, I should think,” she says. “Will Captain Fitzjames stay the night?”

Francis swallows.

“Come back into the parlour,” he says. “Please.”

Fitzjames is sitting in an armchair drawn up close to the fire, his long legs crossed and his hair dishevelled. He has lost his coat somewhere, and his waistcoat is open at the top: his collar disarranged. Head in hand, lost in thought.

When he notices her he makes to stand and she waves: “Never rise,” she says, and then because she is herself cannot resist: “Surely we are close enough now, with only one man between us.” Watches a high flush appealingly spread across his cheekbones.

After a moment he settles back in the chair. Looks back into the fire.

There is a second chair already pulled up too close to the first, at an awkward angle—a kissing angle, she thinks, and nearly smiles. Something so sweet in both of them: innocent, in a way, for all the hells they have walked through.

Francis is hauling the chaise across, too, into the circle of the firelight. None of the lamps lit in here: she supposes they haven’t given Hannah the chance.

She takes a seat in the awkward chair and pushes it back so that she can see both of them.

“Well, gentlemen,” she says, aware somehow that she is presiding. “What have you decided?”

“Nothing,” says Fitzjames, ambivalently, without looking from the fire. “Francis.” He swallows. “Francis is under the impression that you would tolerate—” he leaves off. Doesn’t seem to know what he means to say. “I wouldn’t force you from him,” then, staidly. “Nor him from you. Not to—” Silence again. For a talker, Sophia thinks again, he is strangely ineloquent. She has an impulse to comfort him.

“I would almost certainly tolerate,” Sophia says. “I am generally a tolerant woman.”

“As I said,” Francis says, from his seat on the chaise. Sophia glances at him. His waistcoat is a bit too tight: it suits him, somehow.

“I might,” Sophia says, “even take pleasure.”

“Sophia,” Francis says, sounding pleased—interested. She loves him very much: loves speaking to him, playing games like this. Always has, long before she had any intention of marrying him: which has nearly killed them both.

Fitzjames is watching them look at each other. Breathes out, half a sigh.

Enough, she thinks, enough.

“I think,” she says, in the leading tone of a schoolmistress, “that we might make some sort of—arrangement.”

She looks at Fitzjames: smiles a little. Is aware of him adjusting, minutely, under her gaze: shoulders back, jaw tilted just so. Vain, she thinks: a satisfying trait in bed. To be picked apart with the teeth.

“Yes,” he says. His eyes trace some invisible line strung between the two of them. “It needn’t be anything—sordid,” he says, stiffly. “Only this is—unendurable.” This last to Francis. What, she wonders.

Francis, to his credit, laughs.

“Well, what is _sordid_ , James,” he says. And then, softer: “You have never been sordid in your life.”

“The question now, Captain Fitzjames,” Sophia says, before they can wander into stiff endearments, “is the precise shape of it. Tell me, have you any interest at all in me, or will only Francis do?” Francis, scoffing quietly: and out of reach of her hand.

Fitzjames is staring at her, his head tilted a little. Flicks his glance to Francis. Something she cannot see passes between them, and Fitzjames’s face softens minutely.

“I think,” says Fitzjames, “you had better call me James.”

“James, then,” she says. “James, will you come to bed with me?”

An intake of breath from Francis: she wants to look at him, just to see his face, but it cannot be. She holds Fitzjames’s gaze instead.

“Yes,” he says, after a moment. And then, swallowing, at last with something of the charm she recalls: “Yes, I would like that.”

“Good,” says Sophia. “Francis, I hardly need ask—”

“Yes,” says Francis, unequivocally.

“Shall we all go upstairs, then,” Sophia says.

They look at her, then, both of them together. As though somehow it is her decision, for all the rank in the room. A giddiness to it: she is torn between telling them they are both fools and taking it in stride. Jane, she thinks, would not hesitate.

“Well,” Sophia says. “Someone had best tell Mary and Hannah to take the evening. John, I think, can probably stay.”

—

It is not a smooth ascent nor elegant. They stop, stumble, fall back: Francis holds the door for her and then for James and she goes on ahead but James waits for him to latch it, so that she is left standing on the bottom step looking at them together, their awkward edges nearly touching. She waits for them to come up and they do, keeping pace; she thinks again of ships—won’t voice the thought, would surely make some error, but it makes her smile, anyway. Herself the faltering would-be prize: waiting only for the range to haul her fighting colours up.

Francis kisses her, in passing, his hand at her elbow, his thumb rubbing at the fabric of her sleeve: then goes on, a few steps up. Fitzjames watching, silent, from below. Something open in his face, now, and searching. He sways closer: she leans: a glancing kiss, on the side of the mouth. Tentative: more kind than passionate.

Above, on the stairs, she hears Francis curse, choked somewhere in his throat. Against her mouth James smiles, and she feels something arc between them: the spark of tying Francis’s tongue. She kisses James again: deeper, this time. Makes a little sound in it, a little kitten-mew.

James brings a hand to her waist as she pulls away. She places hers on his shoulder: then turns it, the backs of her fingers against the edge of his jaw. His head turns easily when she presses, his mouth opening: interesting, she thinks. His eyes glassy in the dim light. He is one perhaps who would like to be taken in hand: perhaps he does not know it yet.

She has lost track of Francis, she realizes, though of course this is all for his benefit. When she glances up she finds he has come down to stand a bare step above them, back up against the bannister, hands resting on it at either side. His breathing shallow.

“Again,” he says, in a tone something like need.

James steps up to her, now, and oh, he’s tall: solid, even in his shirt sleeves: his heavy hand still at her waist. A new role, she thinks, and melts into it, against the wall. James kisses her steadily, this time, and firmly: like something from a novel. Pleasant, she thinks, to be had so. A while now, since she had any man like this, all brisk and bold, affectation though it may be. Her eyes when they open drift to Francis, the high colour in his cheeks, their poses mirrored. James fitting so neatly into the space between them.

She puts her hands to his breast: runs her fingertips down the underside of his lapels. Pushes a little, with her knuckles.

“You,” she says. Swallows. “The two of you.”

James’s breath hitches, just barely.

It is an odd place to see it first, in the middle of her own front stairs, with the lamps shining low off everything. The way James leans up, halting: the breath Francis draws before his eyes shut. Then the angle of it, familiar: the easy way they fit together, as lovers do.

—

In her chamber, at the foot of her bed, certain things become clear.

First, this: however they have been together, they have not managed to undress: not fully, not with the lamps lit. She has the pleasure then of watching, the awkward beauty of it, the anxieties of revelation. Fingers on buttons, quick then slowing; shirts pulled hesitantly over heads: James with his bitter scars and his lean shoulders, tilting his head just so into shadow—Francis holding his breath until James kisses him fiercely and he forgets.

On the end of her bed stripped to her shift she watches: her leg folded against her chest, her arm round her knee. Her hand against herself, unforgiving. She could love them both, she thinks, the way she loves Francis: easily. Indeed.

It is James who turns to her first: who breaks the kiss and crawls onto the bed at her side. His trousers still on, but open: the half-hard line of his prick visible. Her fingers twitch.

“Sophia,” he says, “May I—”, and she nearly laughs at him, his misplaced decorum, but she says “Yes” instead, without hearing the end of the question.

His hands come up to her face and she waits, curious: presses her mouth to the heel of his hand, just barely: and then he reaches to pull the pins from her hair.

“Shall I help,” she says, after a minute of this, the gentle twist of his fingers through her careful curls: not one snag, not one tangle: a practiced hand. Who has he has done this for before, she wonders.

“No,” he says, and when the weight of her hair falls against her neck she dips her head. His hand, sliding down her neck to the space between her breasts. Lower, to cup one: his thumb brushing across the peak of it.

She is aware, vaguely, of Francis settling behind her on the bed: his hand on the round curve of her hip.

“It has been some time,” James says, quite plainly, with the weight of her breast in his hand, “since I have been close to a woman.”

“Christ,” Francis says, under his breath.

“How shall we—” says James.

—

How shall we: an excellent question. Slowly. In the warm halflight, with little inquisitive touches: with Francis showing them the way of it. Placing James’s hand at the back of her thigh, just below the crease. Placing hers on James’s shoulders, to work the tightness there and make his head tip back, mouth open. Francis’s hand on James’s prick, gentler than he likes it himself. They find their own ways, too: James lapping the hollow of her throat with his tongue; her fingers in his mouth; his fingers inside her.

(“Are you,” he asks, at one point—swallows—looks awkward—looks to Francis—wondering, of course, whether there will be a child.

“Not yet,” she says. Struck by the sudden ache of knowing she will not have him inside her she wants it desperately: tugs his hand into her lap.)

He is better with his tongue than Francis, perhaps unsurprisingly.

Her legs spread, his fingers tanned and rough against the plush of her thigh: his tongue at the crease of her leg and then against her, in stutters like a code, shallow then deep, off-rhythm—off-perfect, in that way that keeps her twisting for more—and Francis lying on his side, watching, his thumb at the bone of her ankle, saying “oh.”

And when she has had enough of him she pushes at his shoulder and he goes, easily, sliding back from her and off the bed and upright: she rolls her head to look at him and is surprised for an instant that he is still just a man, slighter than she would have thought, and softer at the hips, with his hair tucked back behind his ear. She glances at Francis, thinking to watch him watch James—a new and exquisite pleasure—but he is watching her instead. Only when she slides her eyes back to James—pouring himself a glass of water, now, from the carafe on her dressing table, his back straight and scarred—does Francis turn his head that way.

“James,” he says, voice rough, and James turns—

—

The two of them, intensely gentle with each other. Francis’s light touch at the wound in James’s side: questioning, she thinks. The ragged sound Francis makes deep in his throat when James kisses him: when James slides a hand up his thigh and cups him, less than gently.

Francis for all his defences and deflections open, now, at James’s touch.

James between his thighs sliding into him so devastatingly slowly. Francis with his lip between his teeth and that expression which she can only read as acute pain, though when James lowers himself to ask with mouth against throat “all right?”, all raw, Francis responds with a wordless sound which can only be pleasure, pleasure above and beyond all things.

Their hands, caught together on the bed, fingers twisting.

The drip of sweat on the end of James’s nose.

—

And Francis, finally, sliding home into her, on his back between her legs. The burn in her spread thighs as she lifts and lowers herself, undone when he pulls her down flush chest to chest to fuck up into her, hard and fast as she adores.

For all that she loves performance this is not one: has never been one, between them. They simply find the smoothest routes to pleasure, like water coursing downhill. Francis, rolling her under him without pulling out: hitching her hips up off the bed: the heat of his skin against hers. The tension in his shoulders and his arms as he supports himself: the concentration on his face. His eyes, shut. The kiss he presses to her brow. The weight of him, when he presses her down. Release like a spiral, descending.

And James, sitting up against the headboard, prick soft and spent against his thigh. Just watching. His dark eyes catch hers for an instant, and he smiles.

—

After, with the lamps out. With her hand in Francis’s. He has pulled a shirt on as he always does: less invulnerable, in the afterglow. James curved around them, a loose bracket, asleep. His even breath and his warm hand over her waist, resting in the space between her and Francis.

“I _like_ him,” she says, to Francis. He swallows: his eyes already shut.

“Good,” he says, drifting. “Good.”

“Will he stay,” she asks, hoping, but Francis is asleep.

—

And in the morning the light through the curtains and onto the bed, and Francis still warm beside her, despite the sense of someone moving through the room.

“A mistake,” James is saying. She comes awake quicker, then.

Francis, beside her, quiet and tense. Sitting up now to watch this display. “James,” he says, after a moment. “Must we, again—”

“Christ, _again_ ,” James says, half to himself, stuffing his shirt into his trousers and buttoning at speed. “I can't—I won't—” he is looking for his tie, now, staccato—and Sophia looks at Francis, to see what he is thinking, but he does not look at her. What is written on his face is something like resignation.

“I have no interest,” James is saying, to whom unclear, but so bitterly, “in being a _paramour—_ in _trespassing—_ ”

“James,” Francis says, and then nothing.

“Please,” says Sophia, and James starts. Perhaps hasn’t realized she is awake. “Let us be clear about what we are asking of one another.” She slips from the bed almost despite herself: meets him standing, on her own two feet. Bare in front of him: a weapon in its own right.

“Stay here,” she says. “With us. As long as you like. Live here, James. Tell people you live here.”

“Yes,” says Francis, without pause.

James standing there with his crumpled tie in his hand looking—mortared.

“Have your things sent up,” Sophia says. “Today, if you will.”

Francis on his feet, now, too. His hand touching her shoulderblade, just—light. Through the windows the light pooling on the floor: motes of dust caught in it, turning. Winter light, but turning.

“Please do,” Sophia says. “Stay.”

(She had asked Francis, in those first weeks after the wedding: _And will Captain Fitzjames be living with us?_ Such things are done, though she was not innocent even then of how this case might differ. Francis’s mouth unmoving: his eyes aside: _No,_ he’d said, _I think not._ )

James looking at both of them. Half-dressed, his hair flat, his collar half down. Those little lines around his mouth: discomfort, distrust. So much of him, she thinks, invested in being respectable. So much faith in the sanctity of whatever he is not.

“You were the one,” she says, “who said it needn’t be sordid. So _stay_.”

He brings a hand to his brow: pushes that lock of hair back from it.

“All right,” he says, and it sounds like defeat: but longing, also.

“Good,” Sophia says. “I’ll let Mary know about breakfast.”

(As she goes to dress she glances back: sees Francis extend his hand and draw James into his arms. Sees them tip together. Like sculpture, she thinks, the way they fit. Implausibly balanced. As if cut from one single piece of stone.)


End file.
